What I'm reading right now is Edward Gorey's Amphigorey.
The Secret Parts of Fortune is mammoth, and a treasure, and not to be missed--fascinating journalistic pieces on obssessives, obssessions, strange goings-on, and the stranger-still activities of those investigating the strange goings-on. Plus a passionate plea for the superiority of cats. Plus the unprintable satanic photograph of Long Island. Skull and Bones. Hitler. Watergate. All funny & well researched & true & worth your while.
As is John Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic, which turns what we think of ordinary landscapes as places full of hidden information. I don't want to give too much away--it's a very brief book & lucid and will change how you look at the world, from interstate "clusters" (fast-food joint/gas/lodging) to, well, pretty much everything. (Like many, I was startled into look up Stilgoe by this 60 Minutes story, and mostly by the Harvard professor's example of the FedEx logo, with its arrow embedded in the negative space between the E and the x. It had never dawned on me that anything so familiar could hide information. But of course it wasn't quite hiding. I just was not looking. And I wasn't looking b/c no one had told me to look. Which is the problem, says Stilgoe. We don't take the time to really look, to think, to explore.)
The Secret Parts of Fortune is mammoth, and a treasure, and not to be missed--fascinating journalistic pieces on obssessives, obssessions, strange goings-on, and the stranger-still activities of those investigating the strange goings-on. Plus a passionate plea for the superiority of cats. Plus the unprintable satanic photograph of Long Island. Skull and Bones. Hitler. Watergate. All funny & well researched & true & worth your while.
As is John Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic, which turns what we think of ordinary landscapes as places full of hidden information. I don't want to give too much away--it's a very brief book & lucid and will change how you look at the world, from interstate "clusters" (fast-food joint/gas/lodging) to, well, pretty much everything. (Like many, I was startled into look up Stilgoe by this 60 Minutes story, and mostly by the Harvard professor's example of the FedEx logo, with its arrow embedded in the negative space between the E and the x. It had never dawned on me that anything so familiar could hide information. But of course it wasn't quite hiding. I just was not looking. And I wasn't looking b/c no one had told me to look. Which is the problem, says Stilgoe. We don't take the time to really look, to think, to explore.)
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